


The Quiet Between Heartbeats

by aban_asaara



Series: Month of Fanfiction 2017 [7]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, F/M, Immortality, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-07
Updated: 2017-08-07
Packaged: 2019-10-05 02:01:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17315972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aban_asaara/pseuds/aban_asaara
Summary: The Veil has been torn down; the elves have regained their immortality. But what about the woman Fenris loves?





	The Quiet Between Heartbeats

**Author's Note:**

> Month of Fanfiction - Day 7 - The bad thing that no one talks about. Okay, so I know now this is likely not what would happen, but I couldn’t pass it up.
> 
> [Recommended listening](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnO546nZXv0).

The years had balanced her boldness with patience, her courage with wisdom. She still gave of herself like the world hadn’t once taken everything from her, but now she knew to guard her heart, and laid it bare only for Fenris to see.

She’d loved the sun too much; long summers in Kirkwall had dusted her wintry complexion with freckles and spots, though they’d stopped bothering her once he said they reminded him of the cats that prowled the jungle of Seheron, of the starry sky that vaulted Sundermount. Her thinning skin was all the softer, and he loved every blemish and scar, loved the laugh lines and the crinkles at the corner of her eyes, loved how her breasts hung heavy and spilled out of his hands now. Her mother had been beautiful, and so remained Hawke even as she aged, with her ampler figure and the silver threading her hair.

“We’re going to match soon,” she used to jest.

When she looked at him and smiled, with that spark of blue fire in her eyes, when she threw her head back and laughed that throaty laugh that once had Leandra tutting, he still saw the young woman he had met years prior in the Kirkwall alienage, who had looked at him and seen someone worth her time and affection, who had lit his path out of the dark. When they made love, it was with the same wild, unbridled passion as before, the same frantic awareness that all could be taken from them.

His hands were trembling that first night, he remembered. He’d looked at her, and seen everything he had lost and everything he stood to lose.

How long had those three years felt, away from her. How he longed to get every split second back now. Yet three years was but a drop in the ocean of time, one beat of a butterfly’s wings in the flight of eternity.

His hands still trembled, even now.

He wouldn’t run, though, not this time, even as he watched her sleep and only saw the unbearable finality of mortal life, and death and faded hope and the grief to be. Magic again— _always_ —defiling what he loved most, turning his fragile happiness to ashes in his mouth. He’d never feared death, at least not his own: he would give his wretched life for hers, embrace again the enduring ache of the lyrium branded into his skin for the chance to grow old by her side. He would bear the ritual a thousand times over if it meant not having to stand through the end of all he loved.

But Hawke would die long before him.

Their children would die long before him.

Ages from now, he would only remember them as he did flashes of his life before the ritual: a whiff of rosewater or leather, the spring of sunlight off a shard of glass, a chord strummed on the strings of an oud, the stir of some long-forgotten memory inside him, only for it to be lost again like a face in the crowd. One day he would forget their faces, their voices, the same green gleam as his own eyes, watching back from under hair as black as hers. One day he would forget the curve of her mouth when she told some jest, the flare of her nostrils when she lost at Wicked Grace, the flush that crawled down her chest when she reached the peak of her pleasure. One day he would remember them only in scatters, in wind-swift glimpses: the fresh scent of goat’s milk, the trill of a child’s laugh, a flicker of the bluest blue.

He watched as she slept, her hand resting on her pillow, moonlight casting the faintest gleam on her ring finger. He’d sworn to love her for the rest of his days. What was she to eternity, though, but the twitch of an eyelash, the quiet between heartbeats, the span of one’s last breath?

One day he would forget even the name of the woman he had loved long ago, who had found him when he was lost, who had held her hand out to him, and smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hello on [Tumblr](https://aban-asaara.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
